On Tuesday, Michigan Republicans will decide if they want native son Mitt Romney to be their party’s nominee for president. In a way, this election season is the culmination of the Romney family’s nearly fifty year quest for the White House.

Michigan Governor George Romney—Mitt Romney's father—received 48 delegate votes at the 1964 Republican convention and was considered a front-runner for the 1968 GOP nomination.

That changed on August 31, 1967 when, during an interview on Channel 50’s The Lou Gordon Program, Romney explained his change-of-heart on Vietnam in a manner most would now describe as cogent, reasonable and sincere.

In essence, Romney said U.S. military and diplomatic leaders lied about the state of the war when he visited Vietnam in 1965. In hindsight, Romney concluded his previous support for Vietnam was misguided. The problem is George Romney didn’t say he was lied to or tricked or conned or sold a bill of goods.

“When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anyone could get,” George Romney told Lou Gordon almost 45 years ago.

Almost instantaneously, Romney’s “brainwashing” comment went viral. A generation before thought of the phrase “viral video.”

“I think he was stunned when [Romney] came up with the term brainwashing,” said the talk show host's daughter Deborah Gordon. “My father had been working in the news media for a long time before he had his television show; he was a reporter in Washington DC for a large newspaper chain. I think he realized that the use of the term—that the candidate was possibly brainwashed—for going to be a huge problem for him.”

Indeed, Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy—who, like both Romney and Gordon, was a Vietnam war opponent by 1967—quipped that attempting to brainwash Romney might be overkill: “A light rinse would have been sufficient.”

“It got wide currency pretty quickly,” said veteran Detroit journalist Tim Kiska, author of From Soupy to Nuts! A History of Detroit Television. “It pretty well derailed his candidacy, and you look back at this transcript now…he didn’t even say anything that radical. But tensions were so high about that war, anything you said about the war, people would react strongly.”

Still, how did a seemingly off-hand remark on a local UHF talk show more than a year before the election cause so much damage?

To understand what happened to George Romney in 1967, one must first understand the phenomenon that was Lou Gordon. According to Kiska, Gordon was a master promoter who made sure the national media learned of Romney’s remarks.

“Romney had barely left the building and Gordon was on the phone with the AP bureau,” he said. “The New York Times—Jerry Flint was the New York Times guy here who wrote the story. He made sure all these major news organizations knew about it.”

And while a local talk show on an independent broadcast station might seem like a backwater today, that wasn’t the case in the era before cable. What’s more, Lou Gordon’s bombastic, populist style was appointment television in Detroit and other markets where his show was syndicated.

“This was before talk radio got big, but he was pretty much in everybody’s face,” said Kiska. “He was always in [then-Detroit Mayor] Jerry Cavanagh’s face…Gordon would go after him, he’d go after Romney. He would even go into things like going after the utilities. He was one of those guys, he could sit there and read some page from the middle of proxy statement from Michigan Bell telephone… and he’d make it interesting. And, by the way, he mixed in things like transsexuals and hookers and stuff like that.”

Gordon was an especially tough interviewer, but according to his daughter, an interview with Lou Gordon was something local voters expected politicians to endure.

“[Former Michigan Attorney General] Frank Kelly has said that for any politician to make it at that time, you had to go on that show,” said Deborah Gordon. “There was always a gauntlet you had to run through.”

Even Bob Hope, Deborah Gordon says, wasn’t spared the hard questions. Appearing on The Lou Gordon Program in the midst of Watergate, the legendary comedian was grilled about his stalwart support for President Richard Nixon.

In addition to his talk show, Gordon wrote a column for the Detroit News. He died of heart failure in 1977 at the age of 60.

“Gordon was all about rocking the boat,” said Kiska. “It was good for this town because it inspired public discussion.”